Competence & Performance

語言能力與語言表現

Spring 2026        Thursday 14:10-17:00         文學院 (Humanities) 413

編號 (Course code number): 1307561

 

 Other Web resources

 

Me:

James Myers (麥傑)

Office: 文學院247

Tel: x31506

WWW: https://lngmyers.ccu.edu.tw/

Office hours: Thursday 10:00-noon, or by appointment (made at least 24 hours ahead)

 

Goals:

This class addresses the concepts of competence (grammar) and performance (processing). This time the specific focus is on the relationship between language and consciousness, so we will discuss articles by linguists, psychologists, neurologists, and philosophers on inner speech, language learning, fiction, embodied cognition, artificial intelligence, and all sorts of other fun topics. Students will also suggest articles for us to discuss, which can be on any topic relating to competence and/or performance, and then conduct their own original research.

 

Grading:

10% Class participation

40% Leading discussion

10% Presentations (6/4)

40% Term paper (due 6/11)

 

What the class is like:

This class is a discussion class. All we will do is read papers (real ones, not from a textbook) and discuss them together. So class participation means you discuss: you read, think (!!!), talk, and respond to each others’ ideas.

Every week somebody will lead the discussion on the week’s readings, using a handout with questions to inspire us to discuss together. The questions should be organized in a logical way to make sure we address the most important issues in the paper, situating them in a larger context, but your questions should also allow us to clarify smaller points in the paper that may be confusing. You are encouraged to ask questions that even you don’t know how to answer, but you are the one responsible to bring the focus back to the big issues if we get lost. You do not have to talk more than everybody else, and in fact, the more you inspire other people to say interesting things, the better. Post your questions to the E-Course system by 12 noon on class day.

In order to encourage the use of your own human consciousness, you cannot use computers or phones in the class discussions (so you may want to bring printed readings to class). If you don’t understand something, ask me or a classmate, and if you want to check something online, ask me to do so using the classroom computer.

By the middle of the semester (5/7), you should choose a topic of your own to write about. You will test any sort of hypothesis relating to language competence and/or performance (not necessarily consciousness) using any of the methods that we learn about in the class readings.

After you choose your topic, the discussions will then turn to focus on readings (published articles) that you choose to help you with your project.

On 6/4, you’ll give a conference-style presentation about your research (the precise length depends on the number of students). The paper is due a week later (6/11) as a PDF emailed to me by 5 pm. The paper should be about 10-20 pages, in “English”, with formatting like the real papers we read. I’ll grade them in the usual way (style, logic, theory). (And I can’t believe I have to say this, but hand in your term paper on time, don’t plagiarize, and don’t outsource your brain to AI.)

 

 Schedule

* marks due dates for things relating to your paper

Week	Topic/Activity	Readings	Leaders
2/26	What is consciousness?	Van Gulick (2014) [optional!]	Myers
3/5	Consciousness and language	Arbib (2001) Dennett (1982)	Myers
3/12	Consciousness and inner speech	Alderson-Day & Fernyhough (2015) Langland‐Hassan (2021)	TBA (to be announced)
3/19	Consciousness and neurolinguistics	Kowalewski (2017) Nichelli (2016)	TBA
3/26	Consciousness and language learning	Chen (2024) Svalberg (2007)	TBA
4/2	Consciousness and discourse	Clark & Van der Wege (2005) Oatley (2012, 2016)	TBA
4/9	Consciousness and semantics	Bergen (2007) Hoffman et al. (2015)	TBA
4/16	Consciousness and syntax	Devitt (2014) Jiménez-Ortega et al. (2021)	TBA
4/23	Consciousness and morphophonology	Blazej & Cohen-Goldberg (2016) Morais & Kolinsky (1994)	TBA
4/30	Consciousness and large language models	Chen et al. (2025) Porębski & Figura (2025)	TBA
5/7	*Discuss paper topics
5/14	Your choice	TBA	TBA
5/21	Your choice	TBA	TBA
5/28	Your choice	TBA	TBA
6/4	*Presentations [last class]
6/11	*TERM PAPER DUE

 

Readings

 

Alderson-Day, B., & Fernyhough, C. (2015). Inner speech: Development, cognitive functions, phenomenology, and neurobiology. Psychological Bulletin, 141(5), 931-965.

Arbib, M. A. (2001). Co‐evolution of human consciousness and language. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 929(1), 195-220.

Bergen, B. K. (2007). Experimental methods for simulation semantics. In M. Gonzalez-Marquez, I. Mittleberg, S. Coulson, & M. Spivey (Eds.) Methods in cognitive linguistics (pp. 277-301). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Blazej, L. J., & Cohen-Goldberg, A. M. (2016). Multicolored words: Uncovering the relationship between reading mechanisms and synesthesia. Cortex, 75, 160-179.

Chen, S., Ma, S., Yu, S., Zhang, H., Zhao, S., & Lu, C. (2025). Exploring consciousness in LLMs: A systematic survey of theories, implementations, and frontier risks. arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.19806.

Chen, T.-Y. (2024). Extrapolating from reaction times of acceptability judgments to implicit and explicit learning in artificial grammar learning experiments. In J. Myers & H.-Y. Tai (Eds.), Looking at language from all sides (pp. 65-86). Taipei: Crane Publishing.

Clark, H. H., & Van Der Wege, M. M. (2005). Imagination in discourse. In D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen, & H. E. Hamilton (Eds.) The handbook of discourse analysis (pp. 772-786). Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell.

Dennett, D. C. (1982). How to study human consciousness empirically or nothing comes to mind. Synthese, 53(2), 159-180.

Devitt, M. (2014). Linguistic intuitions are not “the voice of competence”. In M. C. Haug (Ed.) Philosophical methodology: The armchair or the laboratory? (pp. 268-293). London: Routledge.

Hoffman, D. D., Singh, M., & Prakash, C. (2015). The interface theory of perception. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 22(6), 1480-1506.

Jiménez-Ortega, L., Badaya, E., Casado, P., Fondevila, S., Hernández-Gutiérrez, D., Muñoz, F., Sánchez-García, J., & Martín-Loeches, M. (2021). The automatic but flexible and content-dependent nature of syntax. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 15, 651158.

Kowalewski, H. (2017). Why neurolinguistics needs first-person methods. Language Sciences, 64, 167-179.

Langland‐Hassan, P. (2021). Inner speech. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 12(2), e1544.

Morais, J., & Kolinsky, R. (1994). Perception and awareness in phonological processing: The case of the phoneme. Cognition, 50(1-3), 287-297.

Nichelli, P. (2016). Consciousness and aphasia. In S. Laureys, O. Gosseries & G. Tononi (Eds.), The neurology of conciousness, second edition (pp. 379-391). Cambridge, MA: Academic Press.

Oatley, K. (2012). The cognitive science of fiction. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 3(4), 425-430.

Oatley, K. (2016). Fiction: Simulation of social worlds. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(8), 618-628.

Porębski, A., & Figura, J. (2025). There is no such thing as conscious artificial intelligence. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12(1), 1-12.

Svalberg, A. M. L. (2007). Language awareness and language learning. Language Teaching, 40(4), 287-308.

Van Gulick, R. (2014). Consciousness. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.),The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/>. [Optional!]